Elon Musk has stated he contacted Apple Inc’s Tim Prepare dinner “throughout the darkest days of the Mannequin three program” to debate the potential for Apple shopping for the Tesla electrical automotive firm for “1/10th of our present worth … He [Cook] refused to take the assembly”.
Musk’s remark adopted reviews that Apple is engaged on producing an electrical automotive with superior battery know-how. In Twitter threads, Musk and others questioned the character the know-how, together with what was referred to in reviews as a “monocell” battery with lithium iron phosphate chemistry:
Unusual, if true.
– Tesla already makes use of iron-phosphate for medium vary automobiles made in our Shanghai manufacturing unit.
– A monocell is electrochemically unimaginable, as max voltage is ~100X too low. Possibly they meant cells bonded collectively, like our structural battery pack?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2020
The disclosure that Musk approached Apple isn’t a surprise. In 2013, searching for choices to save lots of the corporate amid issues with early gross sales, Musk struck a “handshake deal” for his good friend Larry Web page’s Google firm to purchase Tesla, in accordance with the 2015 biography Elon Musk.
Ashlee Vance writes within the e book that the deal was cancelled after an enormous gross sales drive paid off. Tesla had sealed sufficient Mannequin S orders to rescue its funds, partly by Musk turning employees from design, engineering, finance and different departments out of their workplaces to clinch gross sales, telling them: “If we don’t ship these automobiles, we’re fucked.”
Apple’s automotive efforts, referred to as Challenge Titan, have proceeded inconsistently since 2014 when it first began to design its personal automobile from scratch. Experiences this week stated the automotive may eventually be built by an outside manufacturing partner.
With Reuters
— to www.theguardian.com
